Yellow and blue lighting illuminated the black box theater in the Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday night in Minneapolis. White chairs and tables adorned with sweatshirts, headphones and other personal effects sat scattered around the stage. As the actors emerged, a projector cast a message onto the wall behind them.
“We’ve met with several dozen Minnesotans who have ties to Ukraine,” the projector read. “This is what they have to say.”
It was time to talk about Ukraine.
“An Ocean Away,” a project between Theatre Novi Most and Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik, made its global debut on Oct. 30 and will run through Nov. 8, totaling eight performances. It highlights the stories of people who have lived through the post-Soviet diaspora, who have watched the war in Ukraine from Minnesota.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, sending troops by land, air and sea after Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address he wanted to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, NPR reported.
As of Aug. 13, 2025, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had documented at least 13,883 civilian deaths, 726 of those being children, and 35,548 injuries, including 2,234 children, since the invasion began.
Theatre Novi Most — the name meaning “New Bridge Theater” — was founded by Lisa Channer and Vladimir Rovinsky in 1998. It combines performance traditions from across the globe, having produced nearly 20 new plays and reimagined classic texts since its inception.
This production featured a cast of six actors who interpreted 16 multi-generational characters. The roles ranged from an American mother who adopted a Ukrainian child to a former Russian soldier who moved to Mankato to study information technology.
Each character was represented in what Channer described as “anonymized form,” identified by descriptors, like “Mother in search of justice”, rather than names.
Each actor played more than one character. The only thing to help audiences distinguish between characters portrayed by the same actor was a small wardrobe change, like the addition of an embroidered shawl or a cross necklace.
While the costume alterations were sometimes difficult to track, they highlighted each character’s individuality and reflected the real people whose stories this play was built around.
Live music was the highlight of the play.
The cast played violin, guitar and French horn on stage, joining together to sing a moving Ukrainian song towards the end of the production. They danced and clapped, filling the small theater with sounds that felt authentic.
The music was more than just aesthetic: It was one of the ways the production explored immigrant identity, language preservation and wartime resistance. Every time the cast sang, they carried a part of Ukraine into the theater.
The set was simple but effective. The actors brought to life the handful of white tables and chairs, lifting and moving them to illustrate the story. As characters recounted Russian forces invading their cities in February 2022, others flipped the tables to simulate explosions. They pushed tables as if they were moving vehicles, and hid behind them for protection.
It was clear the play was not just about the Ukrainian diaspora, but also for them. Despite being performed in English, Ukrainian supertitles were projected onto the wall throughout the entire performance, making the performance accessible to Ukrainian audiences, too.
How they did it
“An Ocean Away” is documentary theater, meaning it’s built upon firsthand accounts of real people. It creates a connection between current events and audiences to empower understated voices and examine the powerful.
“Documentary theater isn’t a genre about facts,” Kureichik said. “We turn testimony into a staged statement.”
At a lecture with the University’s theater department, Kureichik said that he, Channer and Rovinsky conducted hours of interviews in multiple languages with community members.
Their challenge lay in condensing this abundance of information into a single show.
“Each of these stories is unique, but together they create a field of truth,” Kureichik said.
To synthesize these unique stories into one coherent narrative, they looked for thematic clusters and character arcs that encapsulated what they learned in their interviews.
“It’s like music,” Rovinsky said. “You listen for themes, for melodies.”
The creative team divided the play into sections that honed in on specific issues. With categories spanning from language to war, these thematically grouped sections found strings that tied together the diverse experiences of immigrants and refugees to tell a greater story.
Although Minnesota is an ocean away from Ukraine, the effects of the war run through the community.
“An Ocean Away” recognizes the resilience, grief and hope of the people whose stories spurred this play, pulling the audience to laugh and sniffle along with them.
